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Founded in 2014, Cardboard House Press is a space for dialogue between poetics that investigate social, environmental, political, cartographic and linguistic formations. Cardboard House Press publishes poetry in translation in the United States by Latin American and Spanish authors and prints books through diverse processes, including letterpress, block printing, stencil, screenprinting and digital. A series of our publications are made by hand in community workshops. All our books are bilingual.


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Wastewater
Aguas Servidas

Carlos Cociña

Translated from the Spanish by Alec Schumacher


A daring ars poetica for living through political violence, Carlos Cociña’s Wastewater is an unflinching probe into the nature of sight and the body politic. When is seeing complicity? How can seeing become resistance? To write into the horrors of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship, Cociña opens a scientific textbook on the eye. An unsettling seduction of fleshly images seeps out, meshing anatomy and political philosophy. The poet examines how inherited ways of seeing form constructions of national memory and history. How are the I and the we mediated by what we can see, what we allow ourselves to see? And what then is the relationship between seeing and naming, seeing and writing? Within a long present in which damage to the eye, both physiological and ontological, remains a widespread tactic of state terror, this ars poetica of political witnessing is for all who yearn toward “that we that is wider than the nation.”




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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
120 pages| ISBN 978-1-945720-47-5
March 3, 2027 | Design: Mutandis
The publication of this book was made possible thanks to the support of the Poetry Foundation


 Praise 

Wastewater is a book about the necessity of looking and listening, of smelling, of touching, and above all, of naming. The bodies have received and suffered anesthesia, but they begin to rearticulate themselves; the parts dialogue laboriously with one another, the senses awaken little by little, to take stock of the painful wounds. Cociña is a visionary poet, author of a body of work that dazzles and unsettles, and whose transgressive force has not diminished with the years.—Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet


In Wastewater, Carlos Cociña’s “scribal eye” (or I?) confronts the possibilities—and the dangers—of what it means to see under dictatorship. With corneas clouded by conjunctivitis, with squinting pupils, with Andean tears, to gaze becomes to act, the “ocular innocence” turns defiant. This is extraordinary poetry long deserving of a wider audience. Alec Schumacher’s luminous translations bring its full force into English.—Katherine M. Hedeen, translator of Antonio Gamoneda’s Burn the Losses


Carlos Cociña is, without a doubt, one of the most revolutionary Chilean poets of the last several decades. His dynamic poetic system is in close dialogue with powerful precursors and contemporaries—Pablo De Rokha, Vicente Huidobro, Nicanor Parra, Raúl Zurita, Juan Luis Martínez, Elvira Hernández, and others—and creates a precise and wonderous linguistic architecture that is at once minimalist and baroque in its vision and materials.—Scott Weintraub, author of Latin American Technopoetics


The poetic body of work of Carlos Cociña is, without any doubt, one of the most important and influential of the Spanish language since the second half of the 20th Century to this day. He constructs poetry that confronts the reader and that, at the same time, ushers them into a lucid and critical gaze on existence and on the convulsive years that we are living.—Andrés Morales, author of Extrañas ínsulas



 Author 

Carlos Cociña is one of the most important contemporary Chilean poets. Recently, his work has garnered more attention, receiving awards such as the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize in Poetry (2014), the Lifetime Achievement Award at La Chascona Poetry Festival (2017) and the Circle of Art Critics of Chile Poetry Prize (2017). His first book, Wastewater, is widely considered to be his most important, and one of the most significant of the years of Chilean dictatorship. A translation of a selection of his poetry Gardens, has been translated to English by Ian Lockaby and published by Cardboard House Press (2021). 


 Translator 

Alec Schumacher is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, translation, and avant-garde poetics. His publications have been focused on Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translations include works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, Luis Correa-Díaz, and Carlos Cociña. His translations and co-translations have been listed for several awards, including the National Translation Award, the Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Sarah Maguire Prize.